For starters: I am overweight and I am not fucked up about it. Here are some of my thoughts on a lifetime of body-based bullshit – a lot of which I only started to realise and address when I joined a gym for the first time this year.

I’m going to focus on the body shape and exercise side of things here because food and loathing is in itself a subject which would take more word count to tackle than our lovely editor has time to read through. Suffice to say that due to being raised right I have always known how to eat healthily, and that ‘diet’ is a four letter word. I’ve sometimes felt a bit left out of the whole dumbass ‘detox fat flush carb starve blah blah fad’ being discussed around the water cooler, but I’m also profoundly grateful that self-hatred regarding food has never been my mother tongue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly confident about my body, but crucially it’s never been the main thing I measure my self-worth by. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that I dodged that bullet.

I have always been overweight (to varying degrees), but I’ve also always been pretty active (my post-viral fatigue syndrome years notwithstanding). For the last few years I’ve been swimming around a mile a week (sometimes more), I do some yoga, and every couple of years I start working out for a bit. Often people do a double-take when they find out that I swim a lot. ‘But you’re a size 16. Does not compute!’ As Health at Every Size can tell you, fat and fit are not always a dichotomy, but nonetheless the cultural assumption is that a big person must be stationary.

However, since the beginning of November last year, I started exercising a lot (I’m unemployed and needed something to keep me busy) and as I started to ‘tune up’ physically I found myself – despite wanting to move up a gear to the next bit – really dragging my heels about ever moving the exercising out of the privacy of my room. I found myself looking up exercise tutorials on YouTube and then trying to figure out how to supplement the equipment they used with something I had lying around. (Water bottles filled with sand instead of weights because owning weights is for, y’know, them… and I’m not one of them.) However, at a certain point I realised that there weren’t many workarounds left for the machines I was genuinely craving a go on – I needed an actual real-life gym.

Swimming (like I say, my physical activity of choice) does involve wearing a swimsuit, but this is one activity I was raised with, and something about being submerged once you’re in, about not ever getting sweaty, about not having to make eye contact with anyone else, made me think of it as the exception to the ‘exercise is scary’ rule. Gyms remained terrifying to me.

Previously known only as the Valley of Horrors

I’d never been inside a gym before this year, and I was convinced that it would be stuffed with supermodel-beautiful people. I was sure the moment I walked in the music would stop playing and everyone would turn and stare like I’d walked into the wrong saloon in a bad western.

When I finally just bit the bullet and went, I was relieved to find out it was full of a range of shapes, sizes and ages, and I did fine on the machines. The guy who did the induction just talked me through how to use each machine, set a goal and left me to it. No hectoring, shouting, or close-ups on unflattering areas like they do on the TV.

I realised later it wasn’t my own performance I was worried about (I know I’m pretty fit these days – I barely got out of breath), but an internalised shame about being a larger person being seen doing exercise at all. I realised I saw exercise as a ‘thin person’ activity.

I get that if you’re aiming to get fitter, thinner or both, then a gym sure as hell helps, but still I was reluctant. It didn’t seem to make any sense – but then I realised: all the shame and embarrassment I was feeling wasn’t about me, it was a response to a lifetime of others’ assumptions. Experiences like being laughed at if I got pink-faced after running somewhere, or always being picked last for the teams in PE (despite being pretty good at football back then – fuck you, my Year 5 class), or a school bully cackling loudly when she overheard me say to a friend “yeah, sure, I’ll meet you after dance club”. My own abilities didn’t put me off exercise – other people’s (conscious and unconscious) group shaming did.

In fact, avoidance of embarrassment has been seen to be one of the largest factors inhibiting girls in the UK from doing PE. The WHO’s own study has noted that:

It is important to recognise the significance of girls’ early experiences of physical activity and it is often within the context of physical education lessons where understanding of individual sporting identity is developed … what were initially regarded as lesser concerns for school governing bodies, such as specific uniforms for physical education lessons and the standards of showering facilities were shown to be significant aspects in girls’ actual enjoyment of school sports.

[…] in sports there are many occasions where the body is literally displayed and this has the potential for the individual to be exposed to negative emotional experiences of shame and embarrassment.

Can I get an amen, sister? I’m writing this a few weeks away from my 26^th birthday, but I only very recently realised that I am still haunted by the memories of the Nelson Muntzs of my school years pointing, laughing or making bitchy comments.

Anyone who does any sports or goes to the gym will tell you: you will get sweaty – that’s how it works – but in my teens (and even before) how well you did at PE wasn’t half as important as avoiding the indignity of getting sweaty, red-faced or out of breath. As a chubbier kid, I was an even easier target for the standard crap.

In a world dominated by the RED CIRCLES OF SHAME from Heat magazine and the like – drawing attention to any perceived imperfections, sweat stains, funny creases and so on in even the most highly-regarded beautiful people – is it any wonder that the perceived embarrassment of getting hot, sweaty or out of breath is prohibitive to many people? The Surgeon General in the ‘States has drawn flak for suggesting that the extra haircare required might be a small contributing factor in putting many women off exercise, and in a world where a bad hair day for some celebrities can make it to the press, is it any wonder that the trickle-down effect has been to make ordinary women self-conscious about these things too?

Fat-shaming is not just a shitty way to treat people (duh) – it’s also utterly counter-productive. To be honest I only ever felt moderate embarrassment about my figure, but I felt acutely ashamed of my body in relation to exercise. I felt that because of my body shape, certain doors were closed to me. Ironically, most of those doors were ones that led to better fitness and possibly even changing my shape.

In an inverse-snobbery retaliation I’d decided that explicit, gym-type exercise was for horrible/vain/stupid people. When I started exercising, I started working through all the years of rubbish I’d accumulated in relation to physical activity – and my self-image has done far more of a reshape than my body has over the past three months (though the body’s coming along nicely, thanks for asking). While I’ve been really enjoying exercising under my own steam, I’ve also been exorcising the ghosts of schoolyards past.

Some of the things that kicked me into upping my exercise ante were finding friends of mine were into certain sports and realising that exercising was actually a pretty normal thing that pretty normal people do. Not everyone who goes to the gym is either a supermodel or a wanker. And some exercise can be pretty badass (I’m still looking for boxing lessons locally – I really want to hit things).

So, uh, morals. Well, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of new stuff, and if you are trying to get healthier then for God’s sake don’t worry about other people. You’re not at school anymore and no one gives a crap. That haw-haw Nelson Muntz kid from the playground isn’t here. They’re grown up, somewhere else, and would probably be embarrassed to remember they were that mean. That toned person sweating on the exercise bike next to you? They’re much more worried about their own abs than yours, and are probably mentally compiling shopping lists as they go. No one cares, and no one should be judging you anymore. This is about you and your body. You’re the one that gets to live in it.

• From reader Stu, a piece on pioneering scientist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Click the links and check out the interview.
• Dating While Feminist: an interview with author Samhita Mukhopadhyay.
• Yemeni women protest in the streets – news piece from the Guardian.
• Doctor Who and Race: call for papers for a new anthology.
• Birds Eye Film Festival 2012’s been cancelled after funding cuts, and we are gutted.
• On a lighter note, since it’s nearly Halloween, our Sarah J tweeted this – illustrator Lucy Knisley’s fantastic one-panel comic on the horror genre.

• It’s our birthday party next week! You have to come! Bring your friends! (The ones that will dig this sort of thing, anyway. If you have friends in the EDL, that could get awkward. NICE FRIENDS. Yes.) Here’s the facebook event!
• The (Tattooed) Beauty Myth – an interesting blogpost on women, getting inked, and the tattoo press.
• Is Sex Positive Ever Negative? – the Good Men Project considers the term.
• The Six Chix – “innovative weekly comic strip devoted entirely to the work of female cartoonists.”
• The Guardian‘s Rebecca Nicholson revisits The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
• That DC Reboot Business: the best links are, we think, this, this (and indeed, the whole No More Mutants column series is ace), and this.
• Men-Ups! – men take traditionally ‘female’ vintage cheesecake pinup poses
]]> /2011/09/30/7592/feed/ 0 7592 /2011/08/26/friday-linkpost/ /2011/08/26/friday-linkpost/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 10:50:26 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7135 Hello to all our new visitors! Happy Friday. If you haven’t read us before, check out the links on the right for movie reviews, Unsung Heroes, Found Feminism, our Alphabet of Feminism, and us generally being excitable at sharks with lasers on their heads.
• Girl Wonder‘s latest project is “No more Invisible Girls“. They’re asking for feedback and stories from female comics fans – “Raising the visibility of women who love superhero comics, one post at a time”. Really great personal stories from readers!
• We do our feminism with a side of Pop-Culture, and quite often something will come up which reminds us why. Here it is. This is why TV, Movies, Comics and pop-culture are important, dammit.
• Found on Sociological Images, here is an incredible 1915 newspaper advert opposing giving women the vote. You know who wants women to vote? Socialists! Mormons! Don’t push politics onto women who don’t want it! Think of the Divorce rate! Amazing.
• Back in May Ken Clarke spoke on a radio show about rape, and said that some types were “serious rape”. As opposed to the other types, including date-rape. (He’s the Secretary of State for Justice, by the way). Mumsnet did a quick straw poll and were completely unprepared for the response they got.
  (Found via Bidisha: “I – we – have tried everything. Rage, wit, sorrow, entreaty, rhetoric, statistics, events, pie charts, festivals, conferences, petitions, demonstrations, articles, activities, education, campaigns, art. We have given our life’s energy to achieve one simple thing: we want to be believed. The only thing I can think of to do now is beg. We are not liars. We have never been liars. We have not made a mistake. We didn’t misread the signs. We are not confused…”)

• Chile is in the middle of serious unrest, as the government violently responds to female student leader Camila Vallejo. She’s calling for an end to their system of elite education hardly anyone can afford, and terrible education for the rest. This has moved into brutal territory very fast – tear gas, beatings of children and students, and ministers calling for Vallejo to be assassinated. The whole country just shut down for two days as public-sector workers joined the students. “Commander Camila” has become the voice of the Chilean youth, asking for the right to education they’d been promised.
]]> /2011/08/26/friday-linkpost/feed/ 2 7135 /2011/07/01/links-were-made-for-linking/ /2011/07/01/links-were-made-for-linking/#respond Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:00:19 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6251 Quick one this week, as some of us are COVERED IN PREP for their Other Projects. The dirty traitors.
• Pablo K (for the second week running; clearly it’s a love-in) in a response to our Sarah J’s post on the We Are Man! campaign, has some worthwhile things to say over on The Disorder of Things about marketing and anti-rape campaigns.
• Hark! A Vagrant brings us STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS and is bang on the money about everything, as usual.(Bonus: and now all the fanart ever has been created, which is probably a little ironic in ways we can’t quite put our finger on.)
• As the Guardian trumpets that French feminism is back – with beards (it went somewhere, apparently), Ladyfest Paris 2011 is this weekend. Anyone in France read us? (Google Analytics says quite possibly, so go for a wander and tell us all about it.)
• Womankind Worldwide launch a wonderful slideshow titled “Our Work With Men”.
]]> /2011/07/01/links-were-made-for-linking/feed/ 0 6251 /2011/06/01/can-adele-and-her-marketing-men-change-the-face-of-women-in-music/ /2011/06/01/can-adele-and-her-marketing-men-change-the-face-of-women-in-music/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:00:36 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5861 Poor old millionaire superstar Adele, eh? No sooner has the dust settled on the furore over her objections to being a higher-rate taxpayer, than she gets thrown into the vanguard of another of those putative Real Women in Music revolutions. A mere three years after she started out, and after just seventeen weeks of her second album at Number One, it appears to have suddenly dawned on Richard Russell that Adele exemplifies all that’s healthy and hopeful in the otherwise dire and overheated state of contemporary pop.

“The whole message with [Adele] is that it’s just music, it’s just really good music,” said Russell. “There is nothing else. There are no gimmicks, no selling of sexuality. I think in the American market, particularly, they have come to the conclusion that is what you have to do.”

The main reason why Russell’s claims about Adele should be regarded with scepticism is that Russell is the head of Adele’s record label. Even leaving aside such vested interests, his argument that she represents some kind of paradigm shift has been ably deconstructed here by Laura Snapes.

The Guardian article linked to above has a few frustrating facets of its own. I’m not sure why Rihanna’s ‘S&M’ should be hoicked in to illustrate Russell’s point: there’s a difference between having a sexualised image – usually, when it’s the subject of criticism, one that’s been externally imposed on an artist – and singing about sex and sexuality. Especially when ‘S&M’ is a more complex song than that framework allows for – arguably one in which Rihanna presents non-mainstream sexuality in terms of female agency. Finally, the idea of good-girl, sexless Adele vs bad-girl, sexualised Rihanna is a false dichotomy with problems in abundance.

Adele’s own image is hardly free of contrivance, harking back as it does to the blue-eyed soul divas of the 1960s – classily sexualised, perhaps, but sexualised nonetheless. In her chosen brand of popular music, a degree of sex in your self-presentation is, as Russell correctly identifies, inextricably linked to commercial success. It’s even arguable, unfortunately, that it’s Adele’s very distance from the currently acceptable aesthetic norms of her genre that has necessitated she be marketed with a different, ‘desexualised’ focus. Had Adele possessed her own voice but the body of, oh, let’s say Katy Perry, would her image have been sexed-up business as usual?

Russell is taking issue, of course, not with the marketing and self-presentation of all women in music, but with a particular branch of commercial pop, and the marketing therein of female artists by predominantly male management, which was ever thus. If his comments do kickstart a new way of measuring the money-making potential of women in music, then great, but it’s going to be an uphill struggle in view of the constant and increasing pressures on female performers – as well as male – to conform to a blandly beautiful industry standard.

Is Adele’s refusal to bow to that standard, as Russell claims, as radical today as the Prodigy were in the early 1990s? Let’s face it, mainstream acts are so limp and colourless right now, and popular culture so devoid of ideas, experiments and imagination, that yeah, it probably is. Never mind that the Prodigy were highly politicised and engaged with a wider oppositional culture, while Adele is outspoken in bemoaning her tax burden.

While no one can begrudge Adele her success, or deny that it’s refreshing to witness, the fact that she can be said to occupy a radical position is more an indictment of contemporary music than it is a compliment to her. The most positive thing about Russell’s remarks is the opportunity they offer to reiterate a greater truth: that commercial profit-driven pap purely designed to generate a profit is more than socio-culturally damaging for women, it’s dull.

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

]]> /2011/06/01/can-adele-and-her-marketing-men-change-the-face-of-women-in-music/feed/ 3 5861 /2011/05/20/all-aboard-the-rail-replacement-links-post/ /2011/05/20/all-aboard-the-rail-replacement-links-post/#respond Fri, 20 May 2011 07:13:27 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5252 READERS.

You have been emailing us! Demanding to know where the linkposts have gone! AND RIGHTLY SO.

• So, to kick off, Slutwalk London comes to the capital! And the date has been changed to June 11th! Previously on Found Feminism when it marched through Birmingham, now it’s blown up majorly. Oars of all colours have been stuck in. Us? We’ll be there. If you spot us (we’re contemplating a banner), come say hello. We’re a friendly bunch, promise.
• Also on June the 11th, Ladyfest Essex – a one day celebration of women and creativity, with the proceeds going to Refuge. Go to Slutwalk, and then head out to Southend!
• The lovely people at For Books’ Sake will be at Bromley Literary Festival on the 3rd of July. Go along and say hello!
• The also-lovely Maegan from TaraBooks, which we are great fans of talks to the Guardian and says things that are well worth reading.
• TreasuryIslands is a badass blog. (You will already know this if you were reading us a couple of days ago, as writer Libby was guestposting. Scroll down. Read that too. It’s Friday.) Particular favourites: Libby versus teen vampire fiction and the posts on feminist-friendly picture books aimed at boys and at girls.
• Comics writer Kelly-Sue DeConnick is on a mission, and needs your support. Go sponsor her as she raises money for Women for Women International to help women in the Congo.

Have a great weekend!

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